While Mario Odyssey and Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle have some sort of local co-op, they don’t really offer a full co-op experience. But at last, our prayers have been answered by Frozenbyte, the company behind a new cooperative RPG game called Nine Parchments.

Nine Parchments can be played with 4 people locally with 4 JoyCon Controllers and the experience is definitely more fun when you are playing with friends side by side within the same room.

Nine Parchments tell a story of wizard apprentices searching for the missing Nine Parchments that were lost during an incident. Through a variety of spells and skills, you go through different areas, fighting different monsters while juggling with different spell elements, health, and mana.

You can think of Nine Parchments like a simplified version of Magicka and Diablo combined (if you’ve ever played those games). You’ll start with a few heroes selection, though more can be unlocked later. The only difference is that each character will start with different selection of spells, so ideally you’d want to complement one another with different sets of spells.

There are also different unique staves that you can find and equip your characters with. These staves give different bonuses such as giving you an X% health back when you damage enemies, and so on. Hats are for cosmetic purposes and do not boost any stats.

Skill points will be given as you progress and level your character up, but there are not much varieties here except for increasing your X% mana regeneration, damage, or resistances. There are no actual new skill branches or a variant of one.

Characters’ progression (i.e the level) will be stored permanently so if you change from playing a single player game to multiplayer, you’ll lose the story progression but you keep your character’s level and skill points to redistribute.

All these actually make me wish that Nine Parchments can somewhat follow Diablo’s example. I wish there are more random loot drops (i.e equipments are more randomised and varied), skills can be further specialised, etc. Though these will definitely increase the game’s complexity and I guess Nine Parchments is not really made for that kind of genre or audience.

Overall, the game is pretty fun to play, especially when you are playing with a few friends. While I tried playing Nine Parchments Solo as well, I can definitely tell my experience was far more rewarding when played with my 3 other friends. Laughters and shouts are guaranteed, as you swap between one spell to another, accidentally shoots a friend with your poison spells, or try to revive a teammate while jumping around trying to evade the enemies attack.

Battles are fun, but feels the same as you have to select and shoot a spell of the opposite element on each battle. After a while, battle does feel repetitive but thankfully a boss battle is thrown in every now and then to mix it up. As you unlock more parchments, you’ll also gain new spell to play around with.

If you haven’t had any cooperative game yet on the Nintendo Switch and often have friends to come and play, definitely try Nine Parchments out for a casual, local cooperative RPG fun. The art and design of the game are beautiful and each time you play with different groups of friends, you’ll be greeted with different, funny moments of play.

Disclosure: Nine Parchments review license was supplied for reviewing, but all opinions are mine and not paid